After serving more than a month of in-school suspension over his dreadlocks, a Black student in Texas was told he will be removed from his high school and sent to a disciplinary alternative education program on Thursday.
Darryl George, 18, is a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu and has been suspended since Aug. 31. He will be sent to EPIC, an alternative school program, from Oct. 12 through Nov. 29 for “failure to comply” with multiple campus and classroom regulations, the principal said in a Wednesday letter provided to The Associated Press by the family.
Principal Lance Murphy wrote that George has repeatedly violated the district’s “previously communicated standards of student conduct." The letter also says that George will be allowed to return to regular classroom instruction on Nov. 30 but will not be allowed to return to his high school’s campus until then unless he’s there to discuss his conduct with school administrators.
Barbers Hill Independent School District prohibits male students from having hair extending below the eyebrows, ear lobes or top of a T-shirt collar, according to the student handbook. Additionally, hair on all students must be clean, well-groomed, geometrical and not an unnatural color or variation. The school does not require uniforms.
George’s mother, Darresha George, and the family’s attorney deny the teenager’s hairstyle violates the dress code. The family last month filed a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency and a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state’s governor and attorney general, alleging they failed to enforce a new law outlawing discrimination based on hairstyles.
The family alleges George’s suspension and subsequent discipline violate the state’s CROWN Act, which took effect Sept. 1. The law, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination and bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, dreadlocks, twists or Bantu knots.
A federal version passed in the U.S. House last year, but was not successful in the Senate.
The school district also filed a lawsuit in state district court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act. The lawsuit was filed in Chambers County, east of Houston.
George’s school previously clashed with two other Black male students over the dress code.
Barbers Hill officials told cousins De’Andre Arnold and Kaden Bradford they had to cut their dreadlocks in 2020. Their families sued the district in May 2020, and a federal judge later ruled the district’s hair policy was discriminatory. Their pending case helped spur Texas lawmakers to approve the state’s CROWN Act. Both students withdrew from the school, with Bradford returning after the judge’s ruling.
link: https://www.aol.com/news/black-student-suspended-over-hairstyle-220842177.html
Maybe try teaching the guy more, and caring about his hair less.
I don’t think it’s racism, just a school with fucking insane rules that should never be allowed:
Barbers Hill Independent School District prohibits male students from having hair extending below the eyebrows, ear lobes or top of a T-shirt collar, according to the student handbook. Additionally, hair on all students must be clean, well-groomed, geometrical and not an unnatural color or variation. The school does not require uniforms.
Why the fuck schools give a single shit about how kids dress themselves or wear their hair is beyond me.
So… Where is the catalog of approved haircuts for students to pick from? Fucking fascist ideas being masked in bullshit like avoiding fake “distractions” in classrooms.
I’d like to see a catalog of edge cases that would theoretically be up to code but still look outrageous.
I’m sure we could get creative here. Like, you could go with the Friar Tuck look with the top part shaved and that would be fine. I guess it depends on what they consider “geometrical”
The approved hairstyles:
Principal Lance Murphy is literally just going to die on this hill apparently. Between the massive cost the school district took because of the 2020 court loss over this exact same thing, and this giant L the school district is about to take for not only being now in Violation of Federal Law but also Texas literally passed a law, because of this asshat and the 2020 loss, indicating that he’s not legally allowed to do exactly what he’s doing.
The school district also filed a lawsuit in state district court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act
Which if you are unsure if your policy is violating a law or not, you should likely not have the policy until the court gives you more clarity. Because if the Courts do indeed indicate that the school is in violation of Texas’ CROWN Act, they’ve just handed this kid millions of dollars in restitution, which I guess they can just pile on top of the millions this school district has blown so far on litigation.
You would think that at some point taxpayers would be up in arms, but nope it’s Texas, blowing billions on stupid lawsuits is their thing.
How does a previous case not automatically make the current situation unacceptable? Do they have to retry the exact same situation over and over again?
Because principal is a bully and willing to use his powers to destroy lives. The methods to protect people are very slow and so he gets away with it for years until the district loses a major lawsuit. Then he quietly gets reassigned or retires and we pretend the entire thing never happened.
blowing billions on stupid lawsuits is their thing.
That and blowing money on highschool football stadiums.
I’m not a kid, but looking back on this type of situation as an adult, I’d settle for half of whatever they offer as long as the administrator(s) driving this were also banned from all public education jobs in the state, permanently. Fines to the district aren’t a deterrent to bad administration on their, but fear of job security absolutely is.
So their guidelines are openly discriminatory at best, and openly racist otherwise…
It’s mind-blowing how quickly the US is regressing because we’re kowtowing to a miniscule minority.
I’m openly curious how well a “liberal” minded individual who isn’t afraid to be an asshole would be received.
Largely, the problem is that the far-right shows up.
No matter how tiny the power grab, they’ll have someone there to grab it, often unopposed.
The problem is largely the structure of our democracy. The left shows up, they showed up more in the last decade than they ever have. And we’re still sliding backward.
Because the way our idiotic system works, the number of people that show up matter less than the zip code they show up in.
I’d love to see what a liberal asshole politician would look like, but i can’t see it working out today. As much as the right blows wokeism out of proportion, PC culture is still a thing in a lot of liberal areas, and if you’re not PC as a liberal politician I imagine you’ll offend the more sensitive parts of your own base. Didn’t Bernie Sanders get hit with some of that? And he wasn’t even that assholeish, he just showed a spine.
Ilhan Omar’s treatment of a woman asking for her political support in opposition to female genital mutilation was pretty close to being a liberal asshole politician (or it revealed her to be trying to have her cake and eat it; namely, that she takes positions designed to get liberal support, and simultaneously strategically acts like a regressive when it comes to FGM to get support from African hijabis and other Islamists).
I’m openly curious how well a “liberal” minded individual who isn’t afraid to be an asshole would be received.
Speaking from experience here, people will actively, and sometimes collectively, attack you for it. They’ll gang up on you online. They’ll openly and often violently bully you in real life. They’ll even abuse the legal system to get rid of you if they are angry enough at you.
Being an asshole towards shitty people (and the vast majority of humans are shitty people, myself included) is very VERY enlightening on how our rights and our laws are just a thin veneer covering what really governs our lives, and that is our feelings. Most humans could give a fuck less about logic, facts or the truth; they only care about their emotions and what they want because they are only connected to the real world through their emotions, not their minds.
Humans are no better than base animals and being willing to be a horrifying House-level dick towards those you think are deserving demonstrates this, really handily.
It doesn’t surprise me that poor young man was forced to go to an alternate school where the diploma he’ll get won’t be as respected by the colleges he’ll apply to. He probably told them off for being so blatantly racist and, in their hurt, they kicked him out.
Are we kowtowing to a miniscule minority? The only kowtowing I personally observe are academic institutions within states with GOP-dominated legislatures and courts. K-12 schools in progressive areas within such states have to tread carefully to keep the man off their back, and public universities have to carefully craft their language relating to research and programs. But largely it’s a semantic game, where the substance doesn’t change but the language used is toned down to avoid attention of asshats. Similar to any research related to human sexuality when there’s a Republican president in the White House and the NIS/NIH leadership is dominated by GOP appointees - they don’t change the research, but they absolutely rework the language used to describe the project.
Pure, unadulterated racism.
Texas actually passed a law banning this. Yea… the State and current governor think this is wrong. Let that sink in.
